Jerusalem was a unique sculptural work positioned on the playing field of the
King Edward VI School by the River Wensum. The sculpture was a life-sized figure
of a military cadet based on a Norwich schoolboy, standing to attention and bearing
an SA80 assault rifle. We paid a local artisan to cast the figure using lead
from spent bullets which we gathered from the shooting galleries of the National
Rifle Association. Casting this figure may have suggested a relation between
the process of education and that of moulding; using lead referred to the toy
soldiers of another age, and related base metal to the intangible ideals of duty
and self-sacrifice.

The figure was displayed on a plinth of stone from Caen in Normandy, and inscribed
by the monumental mason of Norwich Cathedral with the single word, Jerusalem.
As the raw material of cathedrals and castles since the Norman conquest, Caen
stone has long been imbued with symbolic authority from the feudal period in
English history, when the power of Church and State were joined. During the Second
World War, Caen was devastated by Allied bombing in the preparation for D-Day
and the liberation of France. After the War, the city was rebuilt using the local
stone.

Following the French Revolution, William Blake’s hymn ‘Jerusalem’ offered a visionary
critique of militarism and empire-building, yet over time it has become a patriotic
English anthem. The city of Jerusalem has for thousands of years been a sacred
destination to pilgrims of three faiths, both fought over and cherished as a
source of spiritual redemption. Set in the peaceful and quintessentially English
scene of the public school grounds, the leaden figure of a boy soldier stood
facing west in an open space of welltended turf, bounded by mature trees and
crowned by the spire of Norwich Cathedral.

Associations between conduct on the playing field and on the battlefield have
been given historic importance as enduring values in British national identity.
Even today, these values relate to metaphoric connections between fighting for
the conquest of evil and the defeat of an enemy.

'Among the oldest visions of man none is more persistent than the hope of returning one day to a half-remembered innocence. In loneliness he reaches back through emblems - an ikon, a statue or a city - seeking in them a new avenue to God, a fragment of his lost divinity.'
Colin Thubron, Jerusalem, London: Heinemann, 1969